...as a platform for electronic publishing for long term-storage and
reference. One might embrace this instability, as net.art has done from
early on. But it means that the world continues to be stuck with print
books and journals for all "serious" publishing, with all the negative
- and no longer necessary - implications for public access to
information, research, study and learning opportunity outside rich
institutions and countries.

Reasons why the Web is broken for long-term electronic publishing:

The URL system is broken since it doesn't sufficiently abstract from
physical server addresses. This has always been a problem, but has
escalated with the (a) commercialization of the Web
and (b) proliferation of content management systems:
(a) URLs rely on DNS, DNS does not abstract enough from IP addresses
and has been tainted by branding and trademarks.
(b) Content management systems create internal namespaces (that taint
URLs and document structure) and are highly unstable, getting
rewritten/replaced every couple of years. If a document exists on a CMS,
it's unlikely to survive years on its URL. (Ultimately, CMS create just
another layer of spam to the Web.)

As a side-effect, any kind of reference to an online resource - be it
a citation, link or embedded quotation - can not reliably made, which is
why the WWW has not met its original goal of providing a distributed
hypertext system.

Still, the Web is not distributed enough because web servers provide
single points of failure (and document death - an issue closely linked
to the URL and DNS system).

HTML does not provide enough structure for research-level publishing.
More capable alternatives such as extended XHTML, DocBook XML and TEI
XML have not succeeded because their complexity is too much for people
trained on graphical software that emulates, and thus artificially
extends, analog tools and their work flows. Because of this legacy, not
even the rudimentary semantic markup structure of HTML has been widely
understood and used.

Changes / editing histories of documents can only be tracked on the
level of individual content management systems (such as Wiki engines),
not the Web as a whole. However, built-in revision control and version
rollback are a necessary precondition for reliable referencing of
documents. [Ted Nelson had that figured out in the 1970s.]

What could be done:

Introduce a new document identifier/addressing system that fully
abstracts from DNS, using cryptographic hashes as document identifiers
and a distributed registry for those document hashes.